Your Quick Guide to B2C Public Relations
Business to consumer (B2C) public relations is all about three things: product, people and buzz. Let’s take a look at all three of these components and see how they fit together into your successful B2C PR campaign to customers and potential customers.
Product
No amount of great marketing will get an audience to stay if you draw them in and then repel them with shoddy product. In order to keep your audience, you need to know your product from top to bottom. Find its weaknesses and cover them. Advertise its strengths so that you do not have to exaggerate to your potential customers.
Your product must also have a designated niche within your industry. If others outside of your target market choose to make your product a hit as you aim it at a certain demographic, that’s great. However, you will never succeed in trying to make a generic product that casts a so-called “wide net.” Focus the efforts of your product so that you can properly focus your public relations efforts as well.
People
For a public relations campaign to work, you have to find the right people to target. Knowing your product will help you to determine the kind of person that will be most likely to respond to a PR campaign and actually make a purchase.
An exercise that many successful business leaders will do is to create a composite sketch of their intended audience as a single person. What does this person look like? Where does this person shop? What makes this person happy? What does this person need in his life? This makes the people portion of the B2C triangle much easier to handle – you know who to target and who to ignore with your marketing, saving you tons of money and time.
Buzz
Once you have your people and your product in place, you need to build a buzz in order to separate your product from the pack and excite your intended audience. This is where the flair of your PR campaign will come into play. You can set up events that will serve to broadcast your product to the intended audience – “publicity stunts,” as they say. The difference between a publicity stunt that works and one that falls flat is the ability to target that stunt at a particular audience and having a product that can back up the claims that the stunt makes.
